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Breach!

Records from a cell phone used by President-elect Obama were improperly breached, apparently by employees of the cell phone company, his transition team said Thursday.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the team was notified Wednesday by Verizon Wireless that it appears an employee improperly went through billing records for the phone, which Gibbs said Obama no longer uses.

In an internal company e-mail obtained by CNN, Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam disclosed Wednesday that "the personal wireless account of President-elect Barack Obama had been accessed by employees not authorized to do so" in recent months.

As someone who does software development for companies, I am wondering why these people who were not authorized even had access? It seems like these companies don’t do a lot to protect such information. Perhaps a good security measure would be to limit what user logins can actually view that information. If it’s something related to a call center, where customers might call in to find out about call history, then the data can be accessed only after the customer gives them a code like the last four digits on their social security number, or a secret code they come up with when they sign up.

I came up with that system because it makes sense, and I have developed such systems in the past. It works out pretty well. It’s just taking away the keys from the employees who really don’t need access to the information. It also helps protect the companies image, since news like this is anything but a good PR tool.